I just want to make sure that I have the number of syllables straight for is, ea, id. The "-" indicates a syllable break. Have I got this correct? Been a while since I looked at Latin diphthongs. Thanks.

Sure, "ii" and "iis" can certainly be contracted into one syllable, and can indeed also be written with only one "i". But I think the question whether you always should pronounce it that way is not as straightforward to answer as D'ooge makes it seem. No one could rightly hold it against you if you follow D'ooge's advice, but it is certainly not "wrong" to pronounce "ii(s)" as two syllables, as it is usually written. In any case, the difference is rather slight; I wouldn't worry about it...

I actually have to worry about it because I am working on some instructional materials. So I need to settle on something canonical. If I go with D'ooge on ii, should I also treat ei and eum as one syllable? He doesn't say anything about it specifically, but at the beginning, he introduces ei and eu as a diphthongs.

pster wrote:I actually have to worry about it because I am working on some instructional materials.

Uhuh. Well, I'm only speaking from my own perspective, but personally I would prefer consistently disyllabic forms, as beeing clearer, especially if that is how they are written.

pster wrote:If I go with D'ooge on ii, should I also treat ei and eum as one syllable?

No, I would absolutely advice against that. Especially "eum" pronounced with a dipthong I would regard as an error, unless it happens to be in some rare verse in poetry where such a pronunciation is necessary. (I don't know if such a verse even exists; all examples of "eum" I can find in poetry are unquestionably disyllabic.)

How does how they are written indicate that they aren't diphthongs? Or do you just mean the poetic verse indicates that they are two syllables?

Thanks for the help. I'm sure you know exactly what you are talking about. But I may have a few more questions about this tonight and tomorrow. My problem is that diphthongs are actually better for these materials.

ei is monosyllabic at Catullus 82.3, but it may be disyllabic elsewhere. I suspect it might have been pronounced differently by different individuals, in different periods, in different registers. There's really no way to be sure.

Thanks to both of you. So am I to understand that if one encounters a word with an "eu" or an "ei" in a prose text one cannot directly tell whether it is a diphthong or not? What about dictionaries? Do they tell us? Lewis and Short seem not to use macrons. Just an occasional short mark!

And I'm looking at Allen and Greenough and despite their having twenty or more sections on pronunciation, they never address this question head on. I thought in their book they might always indicate diphthongs with a single macron over both vowels but while flirting with such a convention in Sect. 10, they appear not to enforce it, at least judging by early in Sect. 15. But they appear to like macrons quite a bit, so I'm not sure what they are doing with macrons vis à vis diphthongs. http://archive.org/stream/allenandgreen ... 3/mode/1up

This whole matter seems quite different from Greek where I believe, for Attic anyway, we can always identify diphthongs directly.

I believe that "eī" the pronoun can't be a diphthong because the i is long.The exclamation "ei" (the i short), however, is a diphthong.Surely also diphthongs are found only either in word stems & indeclinables or in an inflected ending, as with "ae". A diphthong is an indivisible unit. A diphthong can't be generated as a result of an inflection.

am I to understand that if one encounters a word with an "eu" or an "ei" in a prose text one cannot directly tell whether it is a diphthong or not?

The primary source of evidence for treatment as two adjacent vowels or as a diphthong is in fact poetic scansion. But the fact that Latin orthography isn't completely, absolutely, perfectly phonetic shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who speaks and reads English or French.

Generally, eu was pronounced as a diphthong primarily in words borrowed from Greek (and maybe the interjections heu and eheu). [Update: also neu, ceu, seu.]

It's difficult to tell how ei would have been pronounced--I suspect there might have been a certain degree of variability, and two back vowels (ei) would seem more likely to be treated as a diphthong than a back vowel followed by a front vowel (eu). As I noted, Catullus treated ei as a single syllable in at least one instance--in an epigram in a colloquial register. ei is even treated as a diphthong in 5th declension words such as rei even though the i is long. (See Allen, Vox Latina, p. 63.) I think Priscian may have addressed this question, but he was writing 500+ years after Catullus and the Augustan poets.

Last edited by Qimmik on Sun Jul 28, 2013 4:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.